Monday 29 October 2012

Forget the billions - focus on the victims!

If our governments
want us to feel disinterested and detached from our economic destiny, they’re
doing a good job. While counting on our fingers to see if we can afford a bag
of coal this week, we become blinded and bored in equal measure by the constant
talk of the billions and trillions involved in global economics.

How does this World of
Billions affect me? Isn’t it all beyond my control?

Well, if you want a
seat at the table with Angela Merkel and Christine Lagarde, you may be out of
luck, but there is one thing we can do, which in the long run will make a
massive difference to our lives.

We must concentrate
less on the pathetic sham of the Troika’s policies, and focus on the human
victims they create.

I’m far from bored
with the news. In fact I’m hurting: gut-twisting pain born of watching the most
terrible mistakes of history being made all over again.

There’s no avoiding
the dark irony that by desperately trying to avoid recreating the inflation and
unemployment that brought about the rise of Hitler’s National Socialists,
Merkel’s Germany is making war zones out of Greece and Spain, where as a
result, the extreme Left and Right are thriving.

Forget the
billions - focus on the victims. We need to get down and dirty with the people,
our neighbours here in our very own continent. Right now in modern Europe basic
medical care for children is being sacrificed on the altar of Fiscal
Responsibility, while pensioners are raiding wheelie bins looking for something
to eat.

There is
mayhem on the streets of Greece, where police are telling callers to seek help
from the Golden Dawn Party, a neo-Nazi power-base with 18 MPs. When your mother
is hungry and your child is sick, you don’t notice the flag over the door that
looks so much like a swastika. You take their food parcels, medicines and in
return they own your loyalty.

Yet this
is where the ironies crash around my soul like jagged rocks in a tumble dryer.
The Greeks who resisted German fascist occupation so bravely are now being
driven to fascism by a German who’s frantically trying to avoid creating
fascism. As Greek Prime Minister, Antonis Samaras, said:

“It’s
about the cohesion of our society, which is being threatened by rising
unemployment, like at the end of the Weimar Republic in Germany.”

Instead of
talking over the TV news footage of yet more riots in Athens, take a look at
the faces of the people. We’re all from bailout countries, but they’re being
screwed more violently than us.

Even if you
dare to look inside this World of Billions, it makes no sense. The dreaded
Troika doesn’t even agree with itself. The IMF is begging the ECB to agree to
OSI (you have to have 3 letters or nobody takes you seriously!),
which would allow for either a write-down or a write-off of Greek debt, but the
ECB alongside Angela M are not for turning. The Troika’s own report admits that
Greece will fail to reach its debt-reduction target, while ‘Brussels Experts’
(oxymoron?) say openly that Greek national debt will be 130%-145% of GDP by
2020.

If you had
130 - 145% of your annual income on your credit card, you’d do something about
it, and the Greeks are selling everything they can lay their hands on: palaces;
islands; airports; roads; gas and electric companies.

To appease
the Troika, Portugal was forced to sell its own €3bn power company to the
Chinese, while here in Ireland they’re trying to raise the same amount of money
by selling the right to run the lottery, chunks of Aer Lingus, the Electricity
Supply Board and the forests.

For
centuries you sang plaintive songs about the day Ireland’s rivers will run
free, and now that they finally do, the trees that line them are being be sold
off to pay your overlords.

More irony
cascading out of Portugal, where workers are taking a government minister’s
advice to “...leave their comfort zone and look for jobs beyond our borders.”
They’re heading to now-affluent former Portuguese colonies. 80,000 Portuguese
workers have moved to Angola since 2003, while the Angolan élite are twisting
the term ‘post-colonial’ by buying up large chunks of Portugal. Looking down on
their old oppressors from their Lisbon penthouses, Angolan business leaders now
own 4% of all the companies listed on Lisbon's stock exchange.

José Luis
Sousa, who moved from Portugal to Angola to work in a printing company says:

“Maybe
some day Portugal will be a colony of Angola.”

While
hunger, disease and refugees follow the economic war it wages on its own
people, the EU is awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Armed only with fury and the
human spirit, how can we fight back?

Forget the
billions- focus on the victims.
Follow the lead of Juan Manuel Sánchez Gordillo, the mayor of Marinaleda, a
small town in Southern Spain. Despite Spain’s economic devastation, in his town
there is full employment, people rent homes for €15 a month, and everybody who
works in the agricultural cooperative, including the mayor, earns the same
salary. For themselves, by themselves, the people of the town have built 350
new affordable homes.

Awarded the nickname
"Robin Hood" by newspaper El Pais, Gordillo declared “The crisis has
a face and a name. There are many families who can't afford to eat.” He then
led local farm workers into a supermarket, where they
filled their trolleys with pasta, sugar, chickpeas and milk, left
without paying, and distributed the food to local food banks.

To survive
the World of Billions, we must cling to our humanity. When the Celtic Tiger
died, people on the streets of Galway muttered about how we could now be human
again. Uncomfortable with material obsession, they longed for the return of
that feeling we in the West of Ireland enjoyed in the past: of looking after
each other.